Storm Warning: Ubisoft's 'The Division' Brings The Weather

The first time I spoke to Ubisoft about Tom Clancy's The Division, I was in Montreal to look at Assassin's Creed: Black Flag and Watch Dogs. Since then Watch Dogs, itself delayed, has come and gone, and the pirate adventures of Black Flag have given way first to the French Revolution and then Victorian London as Assassin's Creed has kept to an annual schedule.

Those hoping to find The Division under their trees this holiday will remain disappointed, unless they score an invitation to the alpha. However, Ubisoft has committed to a March 8 release, and the mist around the production lifted somewhat with playable demos at E3 and EGX, revealing entertaining if at times confusing team-based combat. However, the apocalyptic world of The Division is promising far more variety, and features designed to add to the sense of being part of a team waiting for the right moment to venture out into a dangerous world

Tom Clancy's The Division

One of the features of The Division is its social hub, where players can meet, hang out and arrange their next player-vs-computer or player-vs-player match - a grungier version of the Tower in Destiny. And one of the factors that is intended to affect their planning is a day-night cycle and changing weather conditions that promise a greater impact on gameplay than the purely aesthetic weather effects of most games.

I asked Sebastian Lindoff, Lead Environmental Artist and Chad Chatterton, Technical Art Director of Ubisoft's Malmo-based Massive studio, questions by email in pursuit of some more detail.

The Division is being built using the Snowdrop engine, rather than the various iterations of the Anvil engine which many Ubisoft games are built in. What does Snowdrop offer that makes it particularly suitable for building The Division?

Snowdrop was created in-house, at Massive, to make new generation development better. The result of this thinking was the creation of an incredibly powerful engine that empowers the content creators, and gives them as much control and freedom to experiment, innovate and create amazing games.

One of the things that makes Snowdrop perfect for The Division is that it has a very efficient visibility processing. This makes it possible to render large scale, open world environments with a level of complexity that you normally couldn’t achieve in a game world that brings these aspects together.

Thanks to the Physically Based Renderer working together with a day/night cycle and randomized weather system, even the repetition of the Manhattan grid becomes surprising and beautiful to experience.

With such a complex world and such a large cluster of people involved in creating it, another feature that makes Snowdrop extraordinary is its debug tools. It also has a powerful destruction system for high fidelity procedural destruction of objects, a very flexible node graph system for building props and an incredible particle system that really makes the difference seen how much weather and lightning are important in our game.

One of the environmental features of the missions in the Division is weather, and another one is time - in a recent blog post, you talked about how missions taking place on the same map at night will feel totally different from the same mission in daytime. Do players have the freedom to choose when to embark on missions to suit their play style? e.g. could a team decide to "wait out" a mission until dark?

Totally. You can choose when to play any of the missions, night or day, with clear weather or during a snow blizzard. We only restrict some of the heaviest fog settings in some missions because it could adversely affect too much the combat balancing, but all the other weather settings can have an impact on how you approach an encounter, varying the levels of visibility for you and your enemies.

Does the weather change on its own cycle, or is it scripted into missions? So, much as above, could a team wait until the weather changes before setting out, or will a particular mission always have a particular set of weather conditions?

We want the world of The Division to feel like a true, breathing open world, so elements interact naturally. So if you approach a mission at night and you think it may compromise your success, you simply have to wait another time of day to go ahead and approach that challenge.

How does weather work when players are inside the world? Can the weather change unpredictably in the middle of a mission, for example?

Yes indeed! The weather can definitely change unpredictably as it is based on math algorithm and as such it is completely dynamic.

Could you provide some more detail on how the weather impacts play - presumably heavy rain limits visibility, for example, but would snow, e.g, also slow players down? Do different weather conditions play to the strengths or weaknesses of particular classes or technologies? And how do NPCs respond to changes in the weather?

Heavy fog and snow conditions definitely impact visibility not only for the players but also for the enemies, whose detection abilities adjust accordingly.

So even if weather doesn’t physically slow players down, it certainly impacts on what you can see and how you read the environment. For instance, if you usually have a “sniper” approach, you may reconsider going into a mission while it’s heavily snowing.

Regarding the best or worst-case scenarios, there is a dramatic difference between the clearest weather settings and our bleakest snowy and foggy conditions.

The Division well?

The Division has changed considerably from its original conception, and is clearly now more combat and team play-oriented and less RPG-like, although classes, equipment choice and customizations remain - although its setting is vastly different, it could be broadly placed in the same box of adjustably social, multiclass multiplayer shooters as Destiny. However, the setting has done much to mark it out, with publicity having pushed hard on the largely abandoned, post-plague Manhattan environment.

New York's weather can be overwhelming at the best of times, and there is something intriguing in the idea of the kinds of variable environmental elements that added complexity - albeit predictable complexity - to the intense and claustrophobic gameplay of The Last of Us' multiplayer being made dynamic and applied to wider and more explorable areas.

Tom Clancy's The Division - Proving once again that children singing Christmas carols are generally _terrifying_.

Like Watch Dogs, Tom Clancy's The Division has been a long time in the making, and risks both heightened expectations on one side and skepticism on the other. However, logging in, meeting up with comrades, peering out at the weather and deciding to try again when the light is better - counterterrorism as tourism - would be an interesting overlay on the emerging MMOF/TPS or "social shooter" genre.

I am currently a Contributing Editor at Wired Magazine in the UK, having written for Wired UK since its launch in 2009, and speak regularly on the impact of developing technologies on consumer behaviors at Wired Consulting events and elsewhere.